The disclosed embodiments of the present invention relate to processing video data, and more particularly, to a video processing method capable of performing a predetermined data processing operation upon an output of a frame rate conversion with reduced storage device bandwidth usage and related video processing apparatus thereof.
Frame rate conversion (FRC) is a technique to convert a video input with a lower frame rate (e.g., 60 Hz) to a video output with a higher frame rate (e.g., 120 Hz or 240 Hz). Recently, FRC is frequently employed to reduce the motion blur of a liquid crystal display (LCD) panel. Because the LCD panel is a hold-type display panel, each frame will be displayed and held in one frame period. Due to the inherent characteristics of human eyes, the artifact, such as motion blur, will be perceived by the human eyes. The FRC technique is employed to enhance the frame rate (i.e., frames per second), and therefore provides an effective solution to the motion blur elimination. In addition, the electro-optic response time of the LCD panel is not fast enough for certain video applications. An overdrive technique is therefore proposed and applied to the LCD panel for artificially boosting the response time by increasing the driving voltage used to make a liquid crystal cell change its state.
Regarding the conventional FRC function, it requires frame buffer(s) to buffer image data of the successively transmitted frames. For example, taking a normal FRC operation which simply performs frame repetition for example, one frame read from a frame buffer is enough to generated repeated frame(s). Taking another FRC operation which performs motion estimation and motion compensation for example, at least two temporally adjacent frames are needed to generate the desired frames. Provided that a storage device (e.g., a dynamic random access memory) is employed to realize the frame buffer(s), the conventional FRC operation has to write each of the incoming input frames into the storage device and then read requested frame(s) from the same storage device.
Regarding the conventional overdrive function, it also requires one frame buffer to buffer each of the successively transmitted frames. For example, a previous frame read from the frame buffer is needed when a conventional overdrive processing circuit receives a current frame. Provided that a storage device (e.g., a dynamic random access memory) is employed to realize the frame buffer, the conventional overdrive operation has to write each of the incoming input frames into the storage device and then read one requested frame from the same storage device.
As mentioned above, both of the conventional overdrive operation and the conventional FRC operation require frame buffer(s) to successfully perform their functionality. In a case where the FRC function and the overdrive function are both used (e.g., the FRC function and the overdrive function are integrated in a single chip solution), the required memory bandwidth is quite high due to the fact that the FRC function and the overdrive function utilize the same memory device separately.
Therefore, there is a need to reduce the bandwidth usage of a storage device when both of the FRC function and the overdrive function are used.